Hosting

I've just received an e-mail that my hosting contract with Bluehost is set to expire in 60 days. While I've been here for a year and I like the features, I'm going to be evaluating other solutions that I've heard about since moving to Bluehost, in particular HostICan. They seem to have what we want for a reasonable price. I just need to ask them a few questions to ensure they can meet a few special needs of ours that Bluehost currently cannot without paying a good deal more.

It seems HostICan has a base package that has everything we want for only $14.95/month (for a full year), a full $20/month cheaper than what we would pay for at Bluehost.

This shouldn't affect uptime of anything yet as I won't make a full move until I've already paid and transfered all data over. If I do decide to move the site, the forums will go offline the day of the move so that there are no new posts and then hopefully come back online same day (assuming DNS changes happen fairly quickly).

I misquoted prices at Bluehost, turns out it would be a little cheaper to stay with them if we do not get a SSL certificate. This may be fine for our purposes. We don't necessarily need a SSL cert, but it would be nice since they are so expensive regularly (HostICan gives it free with the package I want). I may just buy the dedicated IP and request a few ports opened and be done with it. Bluehost has been good to us so far and for what they offer it really is an amazing deal..

I've done a lot of research and talked with a few reps from HostICan and it does seem like they will give everything we need without the hassles that Bluehost gives, but it is quite a bit more expensive. I have no problem spending the money, but kind of wondering if it is going to be worth it or not since there is a lot to move now and we can get what we need with Bluehost.

Meh, maybe I'll just flip a coin, unless someone wants to weigh in their opinion.

Well if the only real difference would be the ssl cert, what do we need the ssl cert for anyways? We wouldn't really need payments through our website (maybe in the future) but not anytime soon. Is the game going to use it?

The SSL certificate is the only "extra" thing we get compared to Bluehost.

The important thing is the port access. Bluehost blocks all ports except 80 (incoming and outgoing) by default. If you want to open socket connections you need to purchase a dedicated IP and then open a ticket to have specific ports open. HostICan has all ports open greater than 1056. Meaning anything that can run on their servers can use those ports and any outgoing socket connection is possible.

This is important for us specifically for Odyssey. It may have more of a use in the future, but with Odyssey we need an easy way to check server status and to send notifications to server owners. The easiest way is to open a socket to each online server and pass the message to them. We may have more of a use in the future, but for now that is the only true use. So it may be easier to just stay with Bluehost since this is really all we need..

Though now that I'm relooking through the e-mail with HostICan, I think they assumed I wanted a VPS and not a shared hosting package. Let's just stick with Bluehost.